Environment Variables

Environment Variables

GitLab exposes certain environment variables which can be used to override
their defaults values.

People usually configure GitLab via /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb for Omnibus
installations, or gitlab.yml for installations from source.

Below you will find the supported environment variables which you can use to
override certain values.

Supported environment variables

Variable

Type

Description

GITLAB_CDN_HOST

string

Sets the base URL for a CDN to serve static assets (e.g. //mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.com)

GITLAB_ROOT_PASSWORD

string

Sets the password for the root user on installation

GITLAB_HOST

string

The full URL of the GitLab server (including http:// or https://)

RAILS_ENV

string

The Rails environment; can be one of production, development, staging or test

DATABASE_URL

string

The database URL; is of the form: postgresql://localhost/blog_development

GITLAB_EMAIL_FROM

string

The e-mail address used in the "From" field in e-mails sent by GitLab

GITLAB_EMAIL_DISPLAY_NAME

string

The name used in the "From" field in e-mails sent by GitLab

GITLAB_EMAIL_REPLY_TO

string

The e-mail address used in the "Reply-To" field in e-mails sent by GitLab

GITLAB_EMAIL_SUBJECT_SUFFIX

string

The e-mail subject suffix used in e-mails sent by GitLab

GITLAB_UNICORN_MEMORY_MIN

integer

The minimum memory threshold (in bytes) for the Unicorn worker killer

GITLAB_UNICORN_MEMORY_MAX

integer

The maximum memory threshold (in bytes) for the Unicorn worker killer

GITLAB_SHARED_RUNNERS_REGISTRATION_TOKEN

string

Sets the initial registration token used for GitLab Runners

Complete database variables

The recommended way of specifying your database connection information is to set
the DATABASE_URL environment variable. This variable only holds connection
information (adapter, database, username, password, host and port),
but not behavior information (encoding, pool). If you don't want to use
DATABASE_URL and/or want to set database behavior information, you will have
to either:

Adding more variables

We welcome merge requests to make more settings configurable via variables.
Please make changes in the config/initializers/1_settings.rb file and stick
to the naming scheme GITLAB_#{name in 1_settings.rb in upper case}.